Visualize Tufte

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Visualize Tufte

Few teachers are as accomplished as Edward Tufte when it comes to demonstrating why good design matters in the world. Tufte, a Yale professor and the reigning guru of information design, has just published Visual Explanations, the third installment of an acclaimed trilogy. Like its predecessors, this latest book is a knockout.

The philosophy is that clarity and excellence in the display of data almost inevitably leads to clarity and excellence in thinking. Tufte is big on show-and-tell: he presents dozens of illustrations from both the "do" and "don't" categories of information design, and then explains in his straightforward and often witty voice why they succeed or fail.

Tufte tells of a mid-19th-century cholera outbreak in London, and how the medical investigator John Snow discovered the cause. By meticulously mapping the location of each of the disease-related deaths in an affected neighborhood, Snow was able to determine that a single well on London's Broad Street was responsible for the epidemic. (Incidentally, Snow's map also revealed a curious anomaly: residents near the tainted well somehow avoided contracting cholera. Upon investigation, he discovered these people worked at a brewery, which supplied them with free malt liquor - thus they had little use for the well.)

The most compelling example of bad information design involves the infamous crash of Challenger. Surveying documents that the engineers at Morton Thiokol and NASA used to analyze the launching of space shuttles in cold weather, Tufte demonstrates how data about the potential for catastrophic O-ring damage should have been presented. The results are startling. If the engineers had constructed a simple scatterplot that showed how cold weather had corresponded with corroded O-rings, they almost certainly would have nixed Challenger's launch.Visual Explanations is packed with other such vivid examples: how tacky carpet patterns can make stairways treacherous, why the design of the Surgeon General's warning on cigarette packages is deliberately tough to read, how graphical user interfaces can be built to maximize the amount of information conveyed on each screen.

Visual Explanations is for anyone who believes that information design is essential to solving real-world problems. "As for a picture," says artist Ad Reinhardt, quoted in Tufte's book, "if it isn't worth a thousand words, the hell with it."